Musings and stories from a 40-something year old slut newbie

Red flags in a casual situation

Red flag type stuff is interesting when you’re not looking for something serious. Or, at least it is for me. If someone has weird (or no) career ambitions, might be moving shortly, has few (or too many) friends…who cares. I think I’m even pretty blase about certain substance abuse type issues. As long as the person doesn’t bring their heavy use of pot, booze, etc into our situation, what do I care if they are self-medicating? But there are some big red flags – someone who is disrespectful of women, “entitled” to sex, ready to lie to their spouse about sex (which means they could lie to me about risk factors or STD/STI stuff…)…those are absolute dealbreakers to me.

But what about the little things? The stuff that someone plays off as confusion, but is actually rude or insulting. Or too many texts/messages that get annoying. Or too much pressure to meet like RIGHTNOW when I don’t have time to meet (and/or, really just need time to myself). I’ve taken a pretty hard line assuming that, if someone annoys or insults me before we even meet, there is no point in meeting. I think that’s the right decision. But of course I also second-guess myself.

Tonight I had to tell someone I wasn’t interested in meeting b/c his response to me saying I was tired from today’s run was “well, how do you expect to run a marathon if you’re tired from that?” Now, this guy isn’t a runner. He knows nothing about marathon training. So it was a comment out of ignorance. I’ve run 3 marathons, so I have a much better sense of when to be freaking out that I can’t run the damn thing. But I called him on it. He pleaded ignorance. But I still just felt like “ugh. I don’t need to be working through communication issues with someone I’ve exchanged 10 messages with. If we can’t figure THIS out, how is this going to be a drama-free situation?” I think it’s the right call. But who knows. Maybe he is a thoroughly decent guy who was legitimately perplexed how training works and was more concerned than anything else (though he justified his question, rather than apologizing, when called on it).

Anyway, I’m still trying to navigate what is a dealbreaker and what isn’t. When to call it and when to assume the best of intentions (or that something doesn’t matter for my situation). So far I’ve only had one really bad date. And the rest, at worst, have been “no chemistry” dates where the person was perfectly fine, just not someone I’d want to fuck. But I’ve also been stood up a fair number of times and cancelled on a bunch. So maybe I should more ruthlessly weed people out.

But at least the Sexy Geek texted today, telling me how he is looking forward to seeing me again and some of the things he’d like to do to me 🙂 Some guys seem to lose the ability for follow up and charm, as it were, post-sex. At least he did with no upcoming dates in mind where we’ll even be in the same city.